Pieces of Happiness Read online

  Sina, you’ve probably torn open the envelope with a worried knot in your stomach: What is it now? Who is it on the other side of the world that wants something from me?

  There’s nothing to worry about. No one who wants to trick or scam you. It’s an invitation. To warm winds and gentle nights, a wicker chair on a porch with a view of the Pacific Ocean. Do you want it? Will you dare to come?

  —

  She had jumped in her chair when the phone rang. The house phone in the hallway, a long, high-pitched whine, a relic from the past in gray plastic. A shout from someone who still has her landline number in their address book.

  “Hello?”

  A small hesitation, and she was about to repeat herself, her voice slightly more impatient. Just impatient, not scared—Armand never calls the home number. He always wants to catch her when she’s most unprepared.

  “Sina?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hi…It’s Lisbeth.”

  Lisbeth. Her voice was exactly the same, hoarse and slow. The last paragraph of Kat’s letter seemed to glow in Sina’s mind: In that case, you never received it, and no questions will be asked.

  She could just play dumb, deny everything when her old high school friend asked if she too had gotten a letter from the South Pacific. A silly letter with a ridiculous proposition, an arrogant assumption that they, the poor idiots at home, had nothing better to do in their little lives than instantly drop everything and jump on a plane for a reunion with Katrine Vale.

  “Hi.”

  Sina knew she had already betrayed herself. By neither acting surprised nor making her voice dismissive, she had sold herself out. Revealed that an identical letter with stamps bearing iguanas and tropical birds lay on her kitchen table too, this Thursday in July. Removed the option of ducking out.

  “Did you…did you get a letter too?”

  “Yes. Today.”

  “You too. From Kat.”

  Sina could picture Lisbeth’s mouth with the matte pink lips as she stated this with a sigh.

  “She…”

  What was she going to say? What had she thought after the single handwritten sheet of paper had been read, crumpled up, smoothed out again, and reread?

  “She hasn’t changed a bit.”

  “Nope…”

  A chuckle of surprise from Lisbeth, like a tiny animal ducking out of a trap.

  More hesitation. Sina let the seconds tick on and on between them until she couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Well, a trip to the South Pacific, damn, wouldn’t that be nice. If you can afford it, that is.”

  It was as easy as ever. Just as easy to throw Lisbeth off as it had always been. Sina knew it as soon as she uttered the words: the tiniest jibe at her fortune acquired by marriage would put a crack in Lisbeth’s confidence, make her insecurity and self-doubt seep through the layers of makeup. Make her run her long fingers nervously through her hair. Sina hadn’t seen that quick hand motion in years, but she suspected the dark brown locks were as voluminous as ever, stiff with hairspray. She’d regretted it immediately when the poison arrow darted out of her mouth—Oh, be quiet, Sina, stop it! Let her be. Even Lisbeth has gotten old. Did she say that out loud? Even Lisbeth must have grown old, and vulnerable in a whole new way. The way that starts to claw around your eyes just after thirty, grabs the corners of your mouth and yanks them down around forty, drains the color from your hair and sends the bills from the dentist’s office soaring.

  “Yes.”

  Lisbeth’s voice was still noncommittal, limp as a handshake between two people whose paths will never cross again. But the pause after that one small word was too long, too probing. Searching for someone to lead the way, or maybe just someone to spend time with.

  —

  And now here Sina is, jet-lagged, her sinuses itching from an airplane cold, awed that it has taken an island in the South Pacific to bring them together again. Not just for some extreme class reunion, but to actually live together. In a bure with straw mats on the porch and only Kat to keep them together. A home for old ladies! The thought looms like a monster behind her eyelids. What has she done? What has she ended up with here? Four walls—so thin! She can hear the sound of the flushing toilet trickle like a springtime stream through the house—around a simple single bed, and promises of moonlight over a sandy beach. Has she sold herself out? Sina, the cautious, guarded one? She tries to calm herself down. Pull yourself together, you’ve only rented out the apartment, it isn’t sold, you can go home whenever you want.

  But of course she can’t. She can’t accept the money Kat has said she’ll gladly lend her for the airfare if she changes her mind. How would she ever pay it back? With all of Armand’s need for money, plus rent and groceries? She never buys expensive food, and her little car barely uses any gas. She almost never drives it, preferring to use her bike. But still, it’s always about money, has always been about money. The day before Armand’s twelfth birthday—was it really thirty-four years ago?—she had only thirty kroner in her wallet. She had tried to explain to him that they couldn’t have a party on the actual day, but maybe later, after her paycheck came in…He had looked at her without a word, turned on his heel, and walked out, his back an exclamation mark of spite. She had made spaghetti and meatballs with a candle stuck in the middle of his plate, and had sung “Happy Birthday” as she carried it over to the table. He hadn’t even smiled.

  She doesn’t quite know what she was thinking when she decided to leave. She, Sina, go live in a crazy little commune in Fiji? Sina Guttormsen, store cashier, library patron, cautious right-lane cyclist. With traces of early arthritis in her hands and a muffin top that protrudes further over the waistband of her pants than she can bring herself to address. Single mother Sina Guttormsen, whose timid existence was contained within an apartment in one of the oldest buildings in Reitvik, one eye on her boy, the other on her wallet. Still, she knew that life well, she could manage it and live with it. But this? She turns over on her back and inhales through an open mouth, sucking the warm, humid air into her lungs, like swallowing steam in the sauna. The narrow line of tiny ants running across the table. The almost overwhelming smell of frangipani. Kat’s hands, so happy around hers. “I can’t believe you’re actually here!”

  The handbag on the chair by the window holds her passport, a coffee-stained boarding pass stub, and the keys to 19C Rugdeveien. A see-through plastic bag with her lipstick, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, and a minitube of hand cream. A cell phone without a functioning SIM card.

  Sina sits up straight and uses the bedsheet to wipe the sweat from the nape of her neck. She locates the plastic bottle on the floor by the bed, takes a sip of the lukewarm water. Vale nei Kat. Kat’s house. But food costs money in Kat’s house too. Splitting the bills means everyone has to contribute; electricity and soap and toilet paper have their price wherever you live. She briefly wonders: They do use toilet paper here, right? before remembering that yes, she’d seen a roll hanging from a loop of braided rope on the wall.

  How can Kat have become so rich? Sina’s mind jumps directly from the toilet paper question to the subject of Kat’s wealth. How can she be the owner of a cocoa farm? A house and nine hectares of land, with a manager to take care of the day-to-day and additional hired hands for the harvest—isn’t that what she said in the car? Kat, with no more education than the rest of them, who just took off the summer after graduation and got on a plane with a Swede with long curls. And ended up with a life for the adventure storybooks. Three years here, four years there, six years there: building a girls’ school in Afghanistan, bringing solar panels to rural India, establishing a fair-trade coffee farm in Guatemala. Typhoid fever after a meditation retreat in Nepal, blood poisoning from a deep-water coral cut after diving with whales in Tonga. Her passport must look a lot like Armand’s, a flurry of stamps and visas and special permits. But unlike Armand, she really did it all, Sina thinks as she lies back down, trying to avoid the sweaty damp patch on her pil
low. Kat had achieved things. She had moved forward, bearing the typhoid and the malaria like battle scars, gold stars, proof of what she and Niklas had accomplished. The aid they had given the local people, the wells they had dug, the sanitation course they had brought for village midwives that had lowered infant mortality rates by 20 percent.

  Armand’s stomach parasites are less a badge of honor than Kat’s typhoid or malaria. The stamps in his passport are drab and faded, reminders of fiascos that make him look smaller and more pathetic every time he appears on her doorstep with a new excuse. The investment schemes that fell through, the broken promises and unreliable partners, the local idiots who couldn’t see an opportunity when it fell into their laps. That’s when she opens her door and empties her bank account of the meager savings she’s managed to scrape together since the last time he stood there. He’s her child, what else can she do?

  —

  She had managed to stop herself from asking Lisbeth how much she was ready to pay for her trip. How much more expensive is it to travel first class? Business? Sina has never done it. She wonders what it would feel like never to have to ask how much something costs. She doesn’t know much about Maya’s or Ingrid’s finances, but at least they’ve spent their lives working. In good jobs, as far as she knows. Ingrid as bookkeeper for the County Bus Service, or chief accountant as she’s heard they call it now. Good grades in every subject opened up plenty of opportunities for smart girls like her. Those who didn’t spend beyond their means and kept a close eye on their reputations. Surely Ingrid has a good chunk of money saved up, more than enough for a ticket to Fiji.

  Maya went to teachers’ college and ended up teaching in high school. She married Steinar, no surprise that he became an administrator eventually—there was something about his nose, the flaring nostrils, or the glasses perched on it, something hawkish. A teacher couple may never be rich, Sina thinks, but Maya must have enough savings to get her to Fiji. She and Steinar had only one child, a daughter, married to a foreigner. An artist type who paints landscapes, Sina’s seen him in the paper several times. She wouldn’t have minded if Armand had married a foreigner. Even if he’d moved abroad. No problem. If only he’d settled down with someone, found something—anything—to give him some stability. Images flicker through her groggy mind: Armand with a dark-haired woman, maybe Asian, like the downstairs neighbors in the apartment building back home. The eternal wish, the prayer that hangs suspended like a thin thread between her lips and a god with whom she has no relationship: if only Armand could do something, anything! I’m sixty-six, Sina thinks and rubs her fists into her eyes. Sixty-six years old and on the run from my son.

  —

  On the threshold of her first uneasy dream under the Southern Cross, Sina meets Kat again.

  “I’m broke,” she says. “I can’t afford to be here.”

  “There are fish in the sea,” Kat says. “There’s no need to go hungry.”

  “I can bake,” Sina replies.

  “Five loaves of bread,” Kat says. “There’s enough to go around.”

  2

  Ateca

  Dear God

  I know what Madam Kat and Mister Niklas have done for me. I’ve often thanked you for them giving me this job. You know how hard it was for me after the bus crash that made me a widow, how afraid I was that Vilivo and I weren’t going to make it. I worked hard, and you helped me, Lord. You made the maize and the beans grow in the garden so I could sell them on the side of the road, and you made my chickens lay eggs every day. And one afternoon, when the doi tree blossomed, you brought the wheels of Mister Niklas’s car to a stop in front of my house. You put the words on his tongue when he asked if I knew anybody who could help him and his wife in the house, and when he mentioned the salary, I knew it was you that brought him into my life. When I understood that Vilivo’s tuition would be paid, that he would graduate from form six with certificate in hand, I knew it was you that made blessings rain over me.

  You sent Mister Niklas to help me when I was alone. And now it’s Madam Kat who is alone, and she’s filling the house with her sisters. I can see that she needs them, Lord, and they need her too. None of them seems to have a man in her life, and their children don’t live with them. So it seems better for them to have come here. Sisters aren’t necessarily born from the same mother.

  —

  Madam Kat has told me stories about her friends from her country that lies many oceans away. About how people from the same village don’t live with their own kin. It sounds sad, and unsafe. Madam Kat has been here a long time, she knows Korototoka—but the other madams who have come, Lord? They’re going to live here, grow old here, and I’m the one who will have to watch over them. Be merciful and show me how I can do this.

  Madam Lisbeth, for one. Most of the time she doesn’t look so happy. I saw it the very first day she was here, how she hesitates when someone speaks to her. As if she never quite knows the right answer. And why does she stand in front of the mirror looking over her shoulder? Why does she change her clothes all the time, even though they’re not dirty?

  Madam Sina has eyes as sharp as the swamp harrier. She smokes cigarettes on the porch with Madam Lisbeth. But she doesn’t look happy either. Her worries have drawn thick lines around her mouth, and her voice is hard and sour. Is there something she fears, Lord?

  Madam Ingrid is the largest of the madams. She has long, strong arms and wants to help out everywhere. The very first day she came, she wanted to go out into the plantation with Mosese and find out everything about the cocoa. How can I tell her that sometimes it’s better to stay quiet and just watch and learn?

  And soon there will be yet another madam arriving, one I know nothing about. I hope she’s healthy and strong with a happy heart.

  Madam Kat trusts me, Lord. She says it often: “Ateca, what would I do without you?” I have to protect her, just as she protects me. Help me keep her and her sisters safe, so no evil casts its shadow over them.

  —

  And Vilivo, Lord. Keep the shadows away from my son too. Help him and let him find work, so he can support himself, become an adult, and start a family.

  In Jesus’ holy name. Emeni.

  3

  Ingrid

  She peers at herself in the little mirror over the sink, and the woman staring back at her looks surprised. The gaze of a newborn, rimmed with crow’s feet, white cracks in brown icing. It’s taken Ingrid only a few weeks to get a tan, as if the pigment had been lying in wait all these years, reluctant to make itself known. Kat has warned them against the sun. She’s still oddly pale-skinned herself, even after years under tropical skies. “Make sure you cover up and don’t be stingy with the sunscreen. I promise you, after a while you’re not going to care much about having a tan.”

  Ingrid isn’t quite there yet. Every day since she came to Korototoka, she’s thought about how far too much of her life has been spent inside. Work, home, home, work. Inside the apartment, inside the office, inside the car. For years her brother Kjell had tried to convince her to get a dog. “It’ll be a way for you to get exercise every day, and it’ll keep you company!” His wife had echoed this suggestion: “Yes, wouldn’t it be nice for you to have some company!” But Ingrid had suspected that Gro’s enthusiasm for the family Irish setter was mostly about its ability to get Kjell out of the house for the weeklong hunting trip each fall. Ingrid has never had any desire for a dog, or any other pet for that matter.

  Nor had she ever been part of the group of women from work who went hiking in Jotunheimen every summer, with their lightweight sleeping pads and their thermos cups that could quickly be repurposed as ear warmers. She would go for the occasional nature walk on a Sunday morning, but nothing too far and nothing too tiring.

  She found greater joy in Simon and Petter, Kjell and Gro’s grandkids. They are closer to her than to their own grandparents, she’s fairly confident of that. When Simon couldn’t quite get the hang of reading right away, it was Aunt Ingrid who h
ad the patience to sit with him and practice with letter and word flashcards. When he was at her house, Petter was allowed to eat his snack on the couch or bring in a shabby stray cat. Of course she understood that parenting young kids while working full-time was exhausting, of course she didn’t mind having the boys sleep over when their mother had to travel for work and their dad was on the night shift. They get along, the boys and her, that’s just the way it is. She doesn’t make a big fuss of them when they come over, but she enjoys cooking for them—tacos, pizza, chicken wings, nothing fancy. Is it because they’re so young that it’s so easy to be around them? No expectations that they should have something in common. The two dark-haired heads on the couch, bent over their cell phones or card games. Simon and Petter. The best thing in her life.

  —

  When Kat’s letter arrived, Ingrid made herself a cup of coffee before sitting down to study it. Strangely, she didn’t find herself surprised by the invitation—could she call it that? The challenge? The summons? Maybe she’d always known that, behind the prim blouse with the turned-down collar and the glasses on a string around her neck, one day it would be Wildrid’s turn. Wildrid, her secret inner twin. The one who had stayed home when Kat took off all those years ago, but who had silently nodded and understood. Whose eager fingers trembled as she read down the lines of Kat’s handwriting:

  Ingrid, I bet you’ve been standing there a while with the letter in your hand before opening it. Maybe you set it aside for a minute while you made yourself a cup of coffee. Be honest, haven’t you been waiting for this? You’ve visited us in several of the places we lived, you know it’s not all about cocktails by the pool and fun in the sun. You know there are power cuts and water shortages, mosquitoes and malaria. But I think you’ll still be brave enough. Brave enough to go for presenting a united front against loneliness and TV dinners, against arthritis and empty nights. Wearing a floral bula dress and sipping from a bilo filled with kava.